Working on a Building

Gospel Desk has a place in the world, on Spring Hill in Sewickley, Pennsylvania, USA.

April 25, 2020

As I reach out to artists to
collaborate on iconography for the Twelve Believers
project, we are starting to confront the question of the architectural and
liturgical context that the icons will ultimately inhabit. My hope is that they
will live in a chapel within a guest house on our family’s property. This is
essential to the Twelve Believers project and, I believe, an enrichment to the
overall Gospel Desk story, so in this post I want to introduce our guest house
and its situation.

Perched Between Village and Forest

Last year, God blessed our family with a remarkable property on the edge of
Sewickley, Pennsylvania, on a hill called Spring Hill. The property is in two
parcels, each with a house on it. Our family lives in one. Lord willing, we’ll
be able to develop the other into a guest house that in some measure can serve
as a physical home for Gospel Desk.

The guest house at Spring Hill is ripe with potential ...
or ripe for destruction!

Compared to the internal, private sphere of the main house, the guest house
represents a more external and public aspect of our family’s home. But that’s
just the beginning of its symbolic meaning.

Down the valley through the trees I can glimpse the Methodists’ clock tower at
the center of the village. Rising behind us is a hundred-acre wood. Our
property symbolically occupies the boundary between civilization and wild,
known and unknown, order and chaos, structure and freedom, conformity and
individuality, unity and multiplicity. It is a threshold, a portal, a gateway.
Moreover, despite our proximity to the village, the property is difficult to
get to. The road we live on is not terribly long, but it is narrow, winding,
and sliding down the hill. Some houses are sliding with it. We’re at the end,
giving the property a feeling of isolation, almost otherworldliness. It’s a bit
of a monastery in the sky, a place to detach and recenter, but also to pray for
the bustling world below, which I am bound to re-enter. God invites me, here on
the symbolic edge of a civilization in which I am the main character in my own
story, to inhabit the story of which
he is the main character—thanks be to God!

The guest house building itself has not been occupied for decades. The utility
lines are gone. When we took ownership (stewardship, I prefer), three fully
rusted acetylene tanks(!) occupied the porch. Junk filled the upstairs and
downright rubble the downstairs. I shoveled out 50 bags of former plaster and
about as much dryrotten flooring to reveal a clean crack in the foundation that
explains the back wall’s unsettling lean. It’s not actually clear to what
extent the building can be saved. The detached garage did collapse, long ago,
and now cat litter and yard waste fill the spot. Here, then, is the plain
meaning of Gospel Desk’s motto, I’m working on a
building!

Head, Heart, and Hospitality

In the opening chapter of The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis summarizes an
ancient anthropology: “The head rules the belly through the chest.” I see in
this a pattern for what the guest house at Spring Hill can become, if the Lord
wills it: a library upstairs alongside the chapel, and living quarters
downstairs. Maybe some day you will be able to visit, studying in the library
with the Narrative Apparatus, praying in the chapel
with the Twelve Believers, enjoying this special spot
with us, and recentering your life within God’s story.